It’s around 7pm on 25th May, 2018. Ten of thousands of Fulham fans are in complete delirium at Wembley, completely overwhelmed at what we have witnessed. Our Fulham sealed promotion to the Premier League playing a wonderful, fun-filled style of football. We have done it with a group of players who clearly love playing with each other, and with an 18 year-old kid who has been a revelation in the side. We have owners willing to spend both on and off the pitch with a new stadium development incoming. The future is very bright for Fulham.
Fast forward to 10pm, 27th February 2019. We have just witnessed an extremely deflated Fulham side limp to a 2-0 defeat to relegation rivals Southampton. Our Italian manager, the man who led Leicester to the most unlikely of Premier League titles a few years ago, set his side up in a negative way, playing players out of position and leaving our best midfielder in Seri out of the side altogether despite saying that we had no injury concerns.
To say I’m angry at the state of affairs at Fulham right now would be an understatement. I’m furious. What a complete and utter shambles this season has been. What a wasted opportunity. While I think that Slav was out of his depth, I would honestly rather have stuck with him than have sacked him when we did for Claudio Ranieri. While there were some slight improvements at the start under him, the negatives since then have just piled up.
Alongside his frustratingly negative tactics and his insistence on playing Cairney out wide whenever everything good comes through him in the middle, it’s his treatment of Ryan Sessegnon that upsets me the most. He has turned Sessegnon into someone afraid of the football. Benching him, publically saying that he is out of form, not strong enough etc and then the few times that he does play, hauling him off at half time because of a couple of mistakes have all contributed to deflating the player of confidence . Sessegnon was our brightest spark last season and that was because he was given the opportunity to flourish. I’m from a teaching background, and I remember my tutor at university saying that our job as teachers was to create an environment in which pupils could, and wanted, to flourish. I believe that coaching football, or any sport for that matter, has the same principles. Ranieri should be laying the foundations for our players to become great, but instead it’s like the life has been sucked out of them, and it’s just heartbreaking.
We are so far away from that showing of unity last year. Our next three games at home are Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester City- all games that 7 months ago we were relishing. Getting to see your club compete with some of the biggest clubs in the world is something that every fan should relish, but now I just wish that we could fast forward a month. We have a talented squad, but under our current boss I don’t see those players being able to play with any sort of freedom. At the minute we aren’t just going down, we are plummeting so fast that it’s a blink and you’ll miss it sort of scenario.
If we are going down, I want us to go down fighting but to do that we need to remove Ranieri now. I don’t want us to rush into another managerial change, so my choice would be Parker until the end of the season to buy time to consider properly who we want in charge of the team. Another rushed decision isn’t going to do us any favours, but keeping Ranieri for me will do more harm than good.
#COYW
Ranieri has definitely lost the dressing room and when that happens the
players have no direction and are lost. It seems logical to appoint Scotty Parker on a temporary basis in an effort to instill some sort of confidence in the whole club. Scotty has the most recent playing experience with the club and knows the youth set up well. Surely it must be time to blood some of the best youngsters we have rather than see them going out on loan to other clubs and end up losing them altogether. The whole club is a family and with the right direction I am sure they will all pull together which they are not at the present time.
Totally Slav was sacked after the Liverpool game when we didn’t look too bad at all to Ranieris teams playing a very poor system the team is underperforming because of his style of play which does not fit Fulham .Ranier I has to go.
It is so utterly disappointing to see Wolves sitting on 40 points to Fulham’s 17 when the two clubs were so even matched last year. It is hard to understand how badly managed the club has been this year. The last minute underperforming transfers, the sacking of Joka, the hiring of Ranieri and his futile attempts to impose negative team tactics and Ranieri’s treatment of Sessegnon and Cairney beggar belief. I’m a 60 year fan and am utterly disgusted by the club’s performance this year. What a waste of a marvellous season last year1
I’ve supported FFC for 55 years and was overjoyed when we won promotion, and yet a few months later it feels like the identity of the club has been discarded. Yes we are going down, that can happen to any club, but what concerns me is the air of desolation at Fulham and what that means for next season. I agree with all you’ve said, especially about Sess. Rainer I must go now, if the owners don’t realise that, then we could be heading for a repeat next season.
I agree with most of this except Slav being out of his depth at prem level. An algorithm dictated the recruitment and produced poor, inappropriate choices. It’s bitterly unfair to describe Slav as out of his depth after he gave us the best football since Tigana